


course

by curtailed



Category: DCU, Super Sons (Comics)
Genre: Bad Humor, Cringe jokes, Damian being a troll, Fluff, High School, M/M, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-08
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:40:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28334769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/curtailed/pseuds/curtailed
Summary: "You know," Damian begins, "I always find it curious that works set in high school rarely actually talk about the classes in it."Jon drops his pencil. "What?"
Relationships: Jonathan Kent/Damian Wayne
Comments: 8
Kudos: 70





	course

**Author's Note:**

> First fic of 2021! I'd say cheers, but...yikes.
> 
> Just a bit of fluff and BS thrown together for one of my favorite kid couples.

Jon drops his books like an imbecile. Judging by Damian's exasperated sigh -- followed by the shorter boy stacking his textbooks back onto the table in an exaggerated manner, like they were all made of porcelain -- he was likely deeming Jon's mental worth to be something south of a slug.

"Not my fault," Jon complains for the hundredth time.

"We can review your test," Damian explains, remarkably patient for once, "so that you won't fail it the next time. It's a very straightforward protocol, Jon."

"I don't _want_ to."

"I've never seen so much red on a paper."

" _Damian._ "

Damian holds his hands up in a supplicant, if mocking gesture. "Don't shoot the harbinger, Jon."

Jon mutters something that he probably picked up behind the bleachers. Still, he flips open his textbook to Unit 6, Chapter Whatever, and glances up to find Damian staring at him pointedly. A slight heat rises in Jon's cheeks, and he squirms a little under the attention, not sure if it was better to be thrust into the spotlight or not.

He blames it on the snow outside.

"You know," Damian begins, "I always find it curious that works set in high school rarely actually talk about the classes in it."

Jon drops his pencil. "What?"

"For example," Damian continues, scrunching up his face, "if the creator only took up to Calculus II in high school -- and decided not to pursue any higher maths -- then they'd only talk about Calculus II. They'd complain about it."

"Why?"

"Because it was a terrible class. But you'll notice -- they will never go into the _finer_ details. Like vectors," Damian explains, even unhelpfully drawing an arrow on the paper. The arrow went nowhere. "Or force fields. Or triple integrals."

"You're still speaking English, right?"

"They won't talk about how to convert cylindrical coordinates to spherical ones, or the use of directional derivatives." Damian draws a loopy-looking thing that might resemble an x-y-z graph if one squinted hard enough. "What about Lagrange multipliers? Would they ever go into a discussion about those?"

"You know," Jon starts, "I'm always surprised that your crazy warlord grandfather ever had time to teach you about calculus."

"My mother."

"Or her, jeez." Jon quickly runs through a mental list of what possible use calculus could have for a head of an assassination league, and comes up woefully short. "I don't know...does it help?"

"You'll need to be more specific."

"With your training."

"Let me think." Damian ran the tip of his pen across his chin, even pretending to stare out of the window for a deep, thorough search of the recesses of his mind. To Jon's eternal shame, it takes him a full solid thirty seconds to realise that Damian is pulling his leg. Damian's laughter is short, sharp, almost brittle, but it's such a rare sound -- like sunlight breaking through snow -- that it almost makes up for Jon's dignity in expense.

"Can _you_ name a practical use for it during combat?"

This time Jon flushes. Right; _definitely_ the winter weather. 

"But anyways," Damian continues, and if Jon had thought to inspect closer he might have seen a slight tinge of pink warming Damian's cheeks as well, "back to my original point. There's no _depth_ in the _discussion._ School takes up almost a third of the day, but a third of the work isn't spent in the studies of quadric surfaces. Why is that?"

"Because it's boring and doesn't push along anything?" Jon weakly offers.

Damian lets out a long-suffering sigh. "Let's take a look at your test."

"It's not Calculus."

"I'm aware, Jon, or else it would look like a bullfighting flag."

"Look," Jon snaps, folding his arms, "not everyone is as smart as you, okay? Not everyone has some sort of world-class, five-star..." he searches for words, and again comes up short. It seems to happen a lot around Damian, really. "Teachers," he concludes, and it's probably only the barest minimum of respect for Jon's feelings that Damian doesn't start up laughing again. Damian turns his attention back to Jon's test.

"A biology test. Interesting."

"It was not."

Damian taps at the first question on the paper with the tip of his pen. "What is the powerhouse of the cell -- Jon, how did you even miss this one?"

"In my defence, I was -- "

"It's a literal meme."

Jon bristles. "I was saving some old lady's cat the day before the test, alright?"

"And I was whetting my sword at the age of an average infant in diapers, but I'd guess that there's a gulf here." Damian makes a _tt_ sound, like he's half-clicking his tongue, half-trying to gather spit along his back teeth. "Mitochondria. The answer is mitochondria. Say it with me: my -- toe -- "

Jon squashes down the stupid urge to jab Damian in the ear. The last time he had done that, Damian had flipped him onto his stomach on reflex, causing Jon to instinctively fling him through a plaster wall. Mom hadn't let him live it down for weeks. 

"Kahn -- "

" _I know._ "

"Dree -- uh," Damian finishes, the smile growing across his face so absurd and horrible that Jon would rather redo the test again. "And you can tell the creator didn't take linguistics either."

"What."

"They should go more into biology, it's useful for superhero antics." Damian begins writing down the correct answer next to the red ink massacres. "Recessive traits don't have to show up in every generation of a pedigree, Jon. And if it's linked to the X chromosome, sons will display the trait -- "

Jon ducks his head in eternal shame.

"Viruses have two cycles. Lytic. Lysogenic." Damian clicks his tongue again as he scribbles. "This reminds me of a coding quiz we had last week."

Jon peeks through his fingers. "Are we talking about genomes?"

"A topic much of interest to your own heritage, but no. Coding is a useful thing." Damian frowns a little. "Java, specifically."

"I feel like most companies use Python or Perl."

"Nope. Maybe." Damian shrugs. "But my point is, there's so many works that require some operation of machinery -- your father's fortress, or my own father's hideout, or whatever Gordon gets up to. You'd think there'd be more reference to coding than --" Damian mimes tapping on a keyboard at a rapid pace, with all ten of his fingers wiggling like livid worms.

"I don't get it."

"Hacking. Hollywood. Like this." Damian drums his fingers against the tabletop even more intensely. 

"I think your point's still flying a little over my head here."

Damian writes down _abiogenesis_ next to _spontaneous generation._ "It never ceases to surprise me that aliens don't simply download all of the information into their progeny's brains. Like some sort of microchip access." He even makes a little tapping gesture at his temple.

Jon gets it. No, he doesn't; he doesn't get what Damian's going off on, he doesn't get the point of the piece, he doesn't get anything. But it's cold outside, and warm within, and he scoots his chair closer to Damian's thin frame. It's just a warmth thing. Conduction, or something. He listens to Damian talk, biting words at odd with the soft look Damian occasionally grants him with, and outside the snow continues to fall.

**Author's Note:**

> Jon is 15 and Damian is...idk, 17-18? I dunno.
> 
> If I knew higher learning I'd write about higher learning. I do not, unfortunately, so you can glimpse my high school-uni rants.


End file.
